This invention relates to a system that facilitates the management of part lists. More particularly the invention relates to secure synchronization, data access, and data sharing aspects of maintaining a central database of bills of material (BOMs) shared between several owners and accessible to different types of users.
The above-reference incorporated by reference parent patent application Ser. No. 09/832,753 describes how a user can view and manipulate a BOM stored in a remote database by directly communication with a remote application server running an application program that accesses a database containing BOM data. The BOM data of several companies may be shared in the same database. Furthermore users having different roles may access a BOM. Some of those users may be third parties, e.g., suppliers or contract manufacturers.
It often is desired to use the BOM as an index or organizational tool to provide access to a wide variety of data about an item, for example sourcing information about vendors from whom the item may be purchased or the CAD data of that item. For some data about an item, e.g., sourcing data, it may be practical to store this data directly in the BOM database. The term “related data” will be used herein to describe such data which relates to an item and which is stored directly in a BOM database. Other data about an item, e.g., CAD data, may be unsuitable for storage in the BOM database. The term “additional data” will be used herein to describe such data that relates to an item but which is not stored directly in the BOM database.
While access to the additional data could be provided by providing users of the BOM data access to the file space where the additional data resides, it may be desirable to make available views of at least some of this additional data to an external user such as a supplier. Because of concerns about security and ease of administration, it is often undesirable to make data in this file space available to external users. As an alternate to providing access to the file space, the access to additional data may be provided, for example, by uploading additional data from a remote user application for association with the BOM data, and then providing access to the uploaded data. The data may be uploaded to the same location where the BOM resides or to a separate data server. It is desired to store such additional data in encrypted form so that other users of the data server, including the administrators of the data server, have no meaningful access to the data. It is further desired to make a view of at least some of the related data and additional data available to third parties such as vendors.
In addition, it is desired that access to all data about an item be controlled by the application that accesses the BOM database, so that information about which users have access to which data about an item is more easily managed. This access information is generally complex, and for an individual user may include which types of data that user may view, edit, create or delete as well as a set of individual items to which the user has access. In the general case, it is desired to be able to grant each user different levels of access to different items.
In some applications, communication between the users of the BOM and the BOM system uses a Web browser at the user, so that data transmitted between the location where the BOM is stored and the remote user location is encoded in a textual format such as html or XML. The additional data may be in binary form, and may include much larger quantities of data than is typically included in a Web page. Thus it may be desired that such communication occur outside this primary communications (html/XML) channel.
One aspect of having a central location wherein several BOMs are stored is that several different users may access the same BOM. It is desired, however, that some users, e.g., suppliers and contract manufacturers, have a limited view of the BOM and of the data about the items in the BOM. One technique for doing this is to assign access privileges to each user, and also assign privileges to the different data in a BOM so that, for example, a supplier cannot see aspects of the BOM that do not relate to components which they supply.
Such setting up of access privileges for each user and to the data stored in a BOM can be tedious, and in many instances impractical, e.g., where access to thousands of items must be administered across tens or hundreds of users. It is desired to have access privileges and views set up automatically based on data captured as part of the BOM data and related data, so that a particular user automatically has the appropriate type of access to a data item depending on that users relationship to that data item. For example, it is desirable to automatically provide access to a vendor to the BOM items that the vendor supplies, but not necessarily to quotes that a different vendor may have supplied for the same item, or to items that cannot be supplied by that vendor.
It further would be advantageous to provide peer-to-peer linking and sharing of data within a system that contains BOMs from several companies. For example, a BOM item of one company may be linked to a BOM item of another company, thereby indicating a bought/sold relationship between the items. Alternately, a BOM of one company may include directly a shared BOM item whose data is owned and maintained by another company, for example, when a company uses a contract manufacturer and approves one of the contract manufacturer's BOM items for use in their product. Shared BOM items are also desired when a company contracts with a different company to maintain BOM data for commodity items. In these situations, it is desirable for the system to automatically generate for each user of the views appropriate to the role the user has to the data. For example, it would be advantageous for a user who is represents a manufacturer and maintains a BOM for an item of manufacture to see an “owner” view while a supplier who supplies an item in the BOM to see a “supplier” view.
With peer-to-peer linking and sharing of BOM data across one or more users representing one or more companies, it is desirable to have information cascade through the supply chain for an item. In this manner, when a supplier changes a price of a component of the item, for example by accessing the BOM in a supplier view of BOM, the view of the BOM presented to a contract manufacturer would then be automatically updated. It would be further desired that this update to the contract manufacturer's BOM automatically update contract manufacturer's cost and also the offered price of the manufactured subassembly. This change in price for the manufactured subassembly would automatically pass to the view the creator of an item that uses the subassembly sees. It is thus desirable to provide for propagating changes through more than one transaction layer of the supply chain all the way to the cost of a finished manufactured item as provided in a catalog. It is of course desirable that additional information besides cost propagate in this fashion. For example, when a supplier changes one or more of the technical characteristics of an item, it is desirable for the displayed technical characteristics of that item to propagate to other companies that make use of that item. It is also desirable that information about BOM items automatically propagate down the supply chain (from customer to supplier) as well as up the supply chain (from supplier to customer). For example, certain items are made to customer specification by suppliers, and it is desirable for the supplier's view of the item to be automatically updated when the customer requirements for the item are changed.